This invention deals generally with storage structures and more specifically with a rack structure for multilevel storage of deformable rolls of flooring material.
Rolls of flooring material can not be stored in the same manner as rods, pipes, and other hard surface materials. Flooring material is subject to deformation, so that the contact points between layers of rolls stored one on top of another later appear as indents in the material when the material is unrolled onto a floor. This effect increases with the length of time the pressure is applied, so that a bin of rolls in which the lowest rolls would be the first in and the last out of storage, could actually damage the lowest rolls to the point where they could never be used.
This problem affects not only the long term storage of such rolls of deformable material, but also limits the transportation of such rolls. Typical prior art techniques limit the rolls on a pallet to two layers in order to limit the weight to which the lower rolls are subjected. Furthermore, the use of conventional pallets requires that each layer be composed of rolls of a single size and that each higher layer always has smaller rolls than the layer below it. An added problem is that the bands used to retain the rolls on the pallet also cause indentations at the points of contact with the rolls, so that this can also destroy the product on the rolls.
These problems are particularly troublesome in manufacturing operations which produce varying size rolls, and such operations are common because roll length is sometimes determined by the location of a fault or discontinuity in the sheet material, at which point one roll is terminated and another begun while discarding the fault. As these different size rolls come off the manufacturing line they must then be loaded onto a pallet, moved to a storage area, and transferred to a fixed storage rack. Thus, both loading onto the pallet and the transfer to the storage rack must include some means of accounting for the variations in size, and that is frequently done by a time consuming and labor intensive manual sorting process.
It would be very advantageous to have one structure to serve for both transportation and storage, and to have that structure automatically accommodate to different size rolls. Such a structure would eliminate both sorting the rolls by size and transferring the rolls between the transport pallet and the storage rack.